I don’t think the ‘what’ distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the ‘how.’
In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn’t stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he’d made them something else.
It takes brains not to make money,” Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem’s signature. “Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money.
Everyone was always very friendly toward him, and no one was ever very nice; everyone spoke to him, and no one ever said anything.
The soldier who saw everything twice nodded weakly and sank back on his bed. Yossarian nodded weakly too, eyeing his talented roommate with great humility and admiration. He knew he was in the presence of a master. His talented roommate was obviously a person to be studied and emulated. During the night, his talented roommate died, and Yossarian decided that he had followed him far enough.
It was miraculous. Each day he faced was another dangerous mission against mortality. And he had been surviving them for twenty-eight years.
As far as I know, I’m the only Captain Yossarian I know, but that’s only as far as I know.
How much older can you be at your age?
Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation?
Captain Black knew he was a subversive because he wore eyeglasses and used words like panacea and utopia, and because he disapproved of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating unAmerican activities in Germany.
The steady ticking of a watch in a quiet room crashed like torture against his unshielded brain.
My act of rebellion would be absorbed like rain on an ocean and leave no trace. I would not cause a ripple.
When salesmen are doing well, there is pressure upon them to begin doing better, for fear they may start doing worse.
She listens to him with great intensity because she is paying no attention to him at all.
Yossarian’s attitude towards his roommates turned merciful and protective at the mere recollection of Captain Black. It was not their fault that they were young and cheerful, he reminded himself as he carried the swinging beam of his flashlight back through the darkness. He wished that he could be young and cheerful, too. And it wasn’t their fault that they were courageous, confident and carefree.
Why couldn’t anybody understand that he was not really a freak but a normal, lonely adult trying to lead a normal, lonely adult life?
Can’t you stop by my tent on your way to the hospital and punch one of them in the nose for me?” he speculated aloud. “I’ve got four of them, and they’re going to crowd me out of my tent altogether.” “You know, something like that once happened to my whole tribe,” Chief White Halfoat remarked.
She slept for eighteen hours, while Nately dashed about the apartment all the next morning shushing everybody in sight, and when she woke up she was deeply in love with him. In the last analysis, that was all it took to win her heart – a good night’s sleep.
At the state university he took his studies so seriously that he was suspected by the homosexuals of being a Communist and suspected by the Communists of being a homosexual.
Immediately next door to Yossarian was Havermeyer, who liked peanut brittle and lived all by himself in the two-man tent in which he shot tiny field mice every night with huge bullets from the .45 he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian’s tent.
Yossarian gorged himself in the mess hall until he thought he would explode and then sagged back in a contented stupor, his mouth filmy with a succulent residue.